


The Town-Ho's Story

by seekingferret



Category: Fake - The Frames (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 11:23:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11035188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: "Listen to that, Don Pedro. He doesn't believe the two of us could eat a whole whale."





	The Town-Ho's Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleurlb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurlb/gifts).



Sometimes, when we're out having drinks with another couple we don't know all that well, Chris will needle me by suggesting I tell them about the time I knocked down Andrei's door. On the one hand, I've told the story so many times I've polished it into an amusing anecdote, wearing away most of the sharp edges so it can't hurt anyone. On the other hand, Chris is asking because of the sharp edges. 

On occasions when I don't wish to play out Chris's George and Martha dramas, which means most occasions, I suggest that I could tell the Lima story instead. "It's a better story," I say, "Don't you think Jenna and Marco would prefer hearing the Lima story, honey?" This gambit can go one of two ways, unfortunately. If I'm lucky, Jenna will back me up. "Lima story? The city or the bean?" she'll ask, if she's got a little wit, or even just, "If Glen thinks the Lima story is a better story, maybe he should just tell that." If I have an ally, there's not much Chris can do. So I tell the Lima story, which goes something like this:

"It turns out the airport code for Lima, Peru isn't very different from the airport code for Little Rock, Arkansas. Ell-Eye-Emm versus Ell-Eye-Tee. It's hard to believe that you could get on a plane thinking you were heading to Arkansas and end up in South America, but I'm here to tell you, if you're creative, anything is possible. (Especially if your girlfriend just dumped you and you've been mixing percocets with vodka, I could add, but I don't, because it makes this story a little too similar to the story I'm trying to avoid.)

"So here I am, stuck in Jorge Chavez International at 2 in the afternoon. My boss has just ripped me a new one, because I was supposed to be meeting with one of Governor Clinton's aides about a tax incentive package and instead I was in fucking Peru. But there's not much I can do. The next flight back into the States, forget Arkansas, isn't for six hours. And it's a flight to Miami, leaving me a thousand miles from my meeting and three thousand miles from the home office. But I have to book it, because if I miss that flight, there's nothing that'll get me remotely close to where I need to be until the morning. So I book the flight to Miami and try to decide what to do for the next six hours in Lima fucking Peru. And remember, this is the nineties, before cellphones and laptops, hell, before they had big flatpanel screens in the terminals blasting cable news at you. And so, naturally, to the closest bar!

"Which is where I met the Dons. Their names were Pedro and Sebastian. Pedro was short, fat, and jolly, and Sebastian tall, fat, and jolly, and they were clearly perpetual fixtures at this watering hole. They wore tatty wool shirts covered with badly sewn patches, and it wasn't clear to me how they earned any money to cover their bar tabs, let alone to feed themselves, but everyone at the bar very respectfully called them Don Pedro and Don Sebastian, and treated them as if they were practically royalty."

All through this narration, Chris is nodding along, and smiling, pretending she's enjoying the story, with maybe a hint of impatience, waiting for me to get to the good part. Judy and Martin are usually listening intently, 

"I sit down next to the Dons and we start drinking together. I tell them how I ended up here and they're very sympathetic. And over the course of the next hour or two they tell me all their stories of their own exploits. Like the time they were street racing for cash all over Lima on motorcycles, and a policia on a motorcycle started chasing them to arrest them, and somehow after Don Sebastian smashed into a fire hydrant and wrecked his motorcycle, it all ended with all three of them drinking Pisco Sours in the city jail. The stories got more and more unbelievable after that. 

"Listen, Niño-" for some reason they always called me Niño, which means, you know, child. It was always said in a very good-natured way. "Listen, Niño, you gotta hear the story about the time Don Pedro and I were crewmen on the Town-Ho. This was, oh, twenty years ago. I had a fine head of hair back then. The Town-Ho was a medium sized motorboat, about seven or eight crew. It was little more than a tin shell with a motor attached, but she was fast."

"Fast as the wind," Don Pedro added.

"Fast as the wind on a windy day. We were pirates. There were a lot of drugrunning crews sneaking marijuana and cocaine up the coast of Central America to sell to you wealthy Americans. On their way back down the coast they were loaded up with cash and the crews were usually loaded up with liquor celebrating their successful trip. They were ripe for the picking."

Then Don Pedro picked up the story, which felt rehearsed, like each of them knew their part. "We'd cruise around along the coast of Colombia until we spotted one of the drugrunning boats. They were easy to spot- they looked exactly like our boat. Then we'd kill the motor and move in on them with oars. Most of the time we caught them completely off guard until we were right alongside them with our guns. Never had to use the guns, though. The smugglers didn't want to die any more than we wanted to kill. It was a business transaction, y'see?"

Then Don Pedro lifted up his shirt and showed me an ugly reddish-purple scar on his belly. "One time they were all cooperating nicely, handing over the cash, and then at the last moment one of the smugglers pulled out a knife and stabbed me in the gut!"

"I was gonna shoot him, but the rest of the smugglers got scared. They didn't want me to shoot anybody, and they knew I would do it. They could see the crazy look in my eyes. So the rest of the smugglers picked up the guy with the knife and tossed him off the boat. Would you believe that?"

I didn't, not really, but I told them I did. It seemed to be the way to keep the story going, and I was still stuck in Lima for another few hours. 

"Oh, those were good times," Don Sebastian said. "Easy money, until the Peruvian Coast Guard started getting more aggressive. Those guys were crazy. They didn't care if one of them died, if it stopped us. The drug cartels found it was easier to get the drugs into America through other channels."

"Of course it wasn't always good times. Remember that time, Don Sebastian, we got stranded a couple hundred miles offshore by a storm?"

"Oh, yeah..." Don Sebastian said, and here he laid the hook, though I didn't catch it at the time. "We were so hungry we ate a whole whale, just the two of us. Would you believe that?"

I didn't, not relaly, but again I told them I did. But my hesitation must have sounded in my voice.

"Listen to that, Don Pedro. He doesn't believe the two of us could eat a whole whale."

"Well," I said. "I"m sure it was a very large fish."

"It was a whale, not a fish. It was a whole whale and we ate it in one sitting, and we could do it again today."

This went on for a bit, back and forth, with them getting seemingly more and more insulted at my disbelief, until somehow they managed to sucker me into agreeing to bet a hundred pesos that they couldn't eat a whole whale in a sitting. We shook on the bet, and then as soon as the deal is struck, Don Pedro whistles. And before you can blink, guess what they're bringing out from behind the bar?

"What?" Marcus asks. 

"A fucking whole whale. Little baby calf, not more than a foot long, but undeniably a whale. Of course I'd been set up from minute one, this must've been a regular con for the Dons. Tricking the gringos out of their money to pass the afternoon and pay off your bar tab"

Jamie asks "What did you do? Did you pay them?"

"Well, they still had to eat the whale. I sat myself down at the bar and I made them eat every last bit of it. And then I paid. Worth every peso. By the time they were done, and half-green, it was time to get on my plane up to Miami."

I pause for dramatic effect.

"But you know what the funny part is? Years later, I was thinking about the story, and by this time the Internet was a thing. I looked up Don Sebastian and Don Pedro and I found a bunch of old coast guard records. Everything else in the story may have been bogus, but they really were pirates, back in the 70s."

"You never mentioned that before!," Chris exclaims, though I have of course mentioned it before. But she knows she needs to seize the moment now, before Jennifer and Mario get sufficiently distracted that they forget about the door story. She needs to seize control of the conversation again. "You're right, the Lima story is better than the door story with that ending." She wants to pique their curiosity. She wants to coax Joan and Marvin to press me to tell the door story anyway. Usually it works.

"Okay. Fine. I'll tell the story. This is back before Chris and I were married. We were kind of dramatic back then. On again, off again, you know? So one time, when we were off, and she was sort of dating this Wall Street douchebag, total fake, and it pissed me off. I got really drunk, stole a battering ram from the fire department, and knocked down his door. The end."

If Chris wants to hear the story so damned much, she can tell it herself. 

Still, we tied the knot fourteen years ago and the only reason either of us remembers Andrei's name is because of the door story, so... I guess the lesson is, the right woman is worth putting up with some George and Martha bullshit for? Or maybe the lesson is that the fake doesn't win out in the end.

Or maybe the lesson is, don't get drunk and steal a battering ram.


End file.
